She heaved a sigh of relief when she saw Toni arriving with her car at last. Agatha climbed in. “I’ve got a pair of flat shoes in the back,” she said. “I’ll put them on when we get to the farm.”

The farm turned out to be nearly at the top of a very steep hill leading out of the village. “I bet he looks like one of his pigs,” said Agatha. “All that jam. He’s probably round and pink like a porker.”

“It does pong something awful,” said Toni when she drove into the farmyard.

“I hope he’s at home after all this.” Agatha put on a pair of flat sandals and flexed her toes with relief.

“It was a funny time of year for a jam tasting,” said Toni. “I mean, you would think maybe after the strawberries came out.”

“In this backward dump, they probably make jam out of weeds,” said Agatha. “The farm door’s open. Hullo! Anybody at home?”

A thin, commanding-looking woman dressed in jeans and a washed-up cotton blouse appeared in the doorway. She had thick grey hair, grey eyes and a thin mouth.

She looked Agatha up and down and sighed. “You Jehovahs,” she said in an upper-class accent. “Dragging your poor children from door to door.”

“I am not a Jehovah,” snapped Agatha. “My name is Agatha Raisin and this is one of my detectives, Miss Toni Gilmour.”

“Oh, so you’re the female responsible for the deaths yesterday.”

“Look,” said Agatha, “I would like to speak to Mr. Bassett.”

“I am Mrs. Bassett.” Her eyes raked Agatha from head to foot. You could leave the Birmingham slum, thought Agatha, but it was always there, deep inside, waiting to make you feel inferior.

“It’s Mr. Bassett I want to speak to.” Agatha’s small eyes bored truculently into Mrs. Bassett’s face.

“Come in,” she said abruptly.

They followed her into a kitchen which was like something out of the pages of Cotswold Life magazine. It shone and gleamed in the sunlight, from the latest utensils to the copper pots hanging on hooks above a granite counter.